Home health care workers to vote on unionization

Crowding into a state office building Oct. 23, about a hundred home care workers and union organizers with Service Employees (SEIU) Local 503, Oregon Public Employees Union, filed for a union election to represent 13,122 workers employed by the State of Oregon to care for the sick and disabled in their own homes.

Roughly 4,000 home care workers, in a high-turnover workforce, had signed union authorization cards, more than the 30 percent required to file for election.

Ballots will be mailed Nov. 29, and are due back Dec. 13, with the count announced Dec. 14.

On Nov. 6, despite a campaign by anti-union groups to oppose it, Washington voters passed by 63 percent a ballot measure that allows the 16,500 home care workers in that state to unionize. A similar measure passed by 63 percent in Oregon in November 2000, without organized opposition. "Every state should be doing this," said Karen Thompson, a home care worker who is president of the sub-local.

"This campaign is extremely important to the labor movement in this state and also to seniors and people with disabilities," said Steven Ward, Local 503 organizing director. "The bottom line is if you don't treat care givers right, the clients suffer too."

Oregon home care workers - 90 percent of whom are women - currently make $8.14 an hour, and have no health care, not even workers' compensation, nor paid time off of any kind.

The drive to unionize has been under way for about four years, and has been in high gear for the last two. The final push to sign up workers came with a week-long statewide blitz in October, in which union organizers and home care workers from Oregon and other states visited workers in their homes to talk about the benefits of going union.

The union expects to form a bargaining committee and begin bargaining by January or February 2002; health care coverage is workers' top priority.

The Home Care Commission, composed of clients and heads of social service agencies, will be a fairly sympathetic group to sit across the negotiating table from. Nevertheless, Ward predicts possible tough negotiations if the Oregon Legislature chooses to cut budgets instead of raising revenues in a planned special session that will deal with falling revenues caused by the current economic recession.